In Ohio, Farmland and Fiber: Small Towns Push Back on the Data Center Boom

In the small village of Mt. Orab, about 35 miles northeast of Cincinnati, more than 1,000 acres of farmland and forest quietly changed hands in 2024 and 2025. The buyer was a data center developer. The terms were sealed by nondisclosure agreements. Most of the village's 4,300 residents learned about the deal the way people learn about things they were never meant to know , gradually, and with growing unease.

What followed has grown into one of the more unexpected political movements in Ohio in years.

Nick Owens is a small-town attorney and lifelong Republican. He did not set out to lead a statewide coalition. But after the land sale, he helped found Conserve Ohio, a cross-party group now active in nearly all of Ohio's 88 counties. This fall, the group is backing charter amendments on ballots in 10 communities that would prohibit large-scale data centers from being built there. Beyond those local measures, Conserve Ohio is working toward an amendment to the Ohio Constitution that would ban such facilities statewide, with plans to bring it before voters in 2027.

The movement has found traction in places that might seem like unlikely ground. Brown County, which includes Mt. Orab, voted 80 percent for Donald Trump in 2024. Yet campaign yard signs are conspicuously absent this fall, and Owens links that quiet, at least in part, to the data center dispute and to elevated diesel prices hitting farmers and truckers in the area.

Ohio has been building out data infrastructure for roughly a decade. Cheap land, existing energy networks, and substantial tax incentives made the state attractive to large technology companies looking to house servers and processing equipment. For years, the facilities arrived with relatively little friction. The newest generation is different. Built to handle artificial intelligence workloads, the latest projects are significantly larger and demand far more power than earlier facilities. They also tend to arrive under agreements that leave neighbors with limited information about what is being built, how much energy it will consume, and what supporting infrastructure , including new power plants , will be required nearby.

That last point is central to Owens's argument. A hyperscale data center does not operate in isolation. It draws heavily on the regional power grid, and in some cases that demand requires new generation capacity. New power plants bring noise, emissions, and industrial-scale construction to areas that have known neither. The financial return to the community is real , data centers do generate tax revenue, and some of that flows to local schools , but Owens argues the exchange is not a fair one, and that it is being made without genuine community consent. "Our community is not for sale," he has said. He and other advocates point to old industrial sites and brownfields as more appropriate locations, places already carrying the marks of prior development rather than active farmland.

Linda Moodie, an independent volunteer with Conserve Ohio, has come to a similar conclusion through a different route. She does not believe a statewide election will solve the problem. Whoever wins in November, she says, is unlikely to hand local communities meaningful control over whether and where these facilities are built. Her focus is the petition drive, which has gathered signatures across county lines and party affiliations.

The issue has entered Ohio's Senate race, though not always cleanly. Former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has called his opponent, incumbent Republican Senator Jon Husted, "the face of data centers." Husted, for his part, has pointed to Brown's earlier support for data center development in the state and introduced legislation that would require data centers to fund power grid upgrades , a bill that stalled when Senate Democrats blocked it. Both arguments carry some weight, and neither fully escapes its own contradictions.

President Trump's intervention did not quiet things in communities like Mt. Orab. He warned that towns refusing data centers risk being "backwards and poor." Owens pushed back directly, arguing that the president misread what the opposition was about. The residents raising objections are not anti-technology or anti-growth in any simple sense. They are asking a more specific question: whether their particular land, their particular community, should bear the costs of a buildout that benefits a much broader group of people and corporations.

That question does not have an easy answer. Data centers are genuinely useful. They store information, run services, and increasingly support the artificial intelligence tools that businesses and governments are building into daily operations. The electricity they consume and the land they occupy are real costs, and someone will always bear them. The argument in Mt. Orab and across Ohio is about who gets to decide where those costs land, and whether communities have a meaningful voice before the papers are signed.

Ohio has not yet resolved that argument. The charter amendments this fall will test how much appetite there is, even in heavily Republican areas, for a hard stop on new facilities. The constitutional campaign for 2027 is a longer and more uncertain road. What is clear is that the movement is durable and broad, built from neighborhood conversations and petition tables rather than party infrastructure.

The deeper question , how a democratic society manages the geographic concentration of a technology it broadly wants , will not be settled in one state, or in one election cycle.

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